Natasha's Dance полностью

understand and relate to as positive ideals. For the militants of RAPP this could only be achieved by writers like Gorky, with his impeccably proletarian background, not by left-wing 'bourgeois' writers who were deemed no more than 'fellow travellers'. Between 1928 and 1931 some 10,000 'shock authors', literary confreres of the 'shock workers' who would lead the charge to meet the Plan, were plucked from the shop-floor and trained by RAPP to write workers' stories for the Soviet press.⁹³

Gorky was hailed as the model for this Soviet literature. In 1921, horrified by the Revolution's turn to violence and dictatorship, Gorky fled to Europe. But he could not bear the life of an exile: he was disillusioned by the rise of fascism in his adopted homeland of Italy; and he convinced himself that life in Stalin's Russia would become more bearable once the Five-year Plan had swept aside the peasant backwardness which in his view had been the cause of the Revolution's failure. From 1928 Gorky began to spend his summers in the Soviet Union and in 1931 Gorky returned home for good. The prodigal son was showered with honours: streets, buildings, farms and schools were named after him; a trilogy of films was made about his life; the Moscow Arts Theatre was renamed the Gorky Theatre; and his native city (Nizhnyi Novgorod) was renamed after him. He was also appointed head of the Writers' Union, the post previously held by Pilnyak.

Gorky had initially supported the RAPP campaign of promoting worker authors as a temporary experiment, but he quickly realized that the quality of the writing was not good. In April 1932 the Central Committee passed a resolution to abolish RAPP, together with all other independent literary groups, and placed them under the centralized control of the Writers' Union. Gorky's influence was instrumental in this sudden change of direction, but things did not quite turn out as he had planned. Gorky's intention had been two-fold: to halt the destructive 'class war' led by RAPP; and to restore to Soviet literature the aesthetic principles established by Tolstoy. In October 1932, a famous meeting attended by Stalin and other Kremlin leaders, as well as fifty writers and other functionaries, took place at Gorky's Moscow house. It was at this meeting that the doctrine of Socialist Realism was formulated, although at the time it was not clear to Gorky that it would become a regimented orthodoxy for all artists in the

Soviet Union. Gorky's understanding was that Socialist Realism would unite the critical realist traditions of nineteenth-century literature with the revolutionary romanticism of the Bolshevik tradition. It was to combine the depiction of the humble everyday reality of life in the Soviet Union with a vision of the Revolution's heroic promise. But in Stalin's version of the doctrine, as defined at the First Congress of the Writers' Union in 1934, it meant that the artist was to portray Soviet life, not as it was in reality, but as it should become:

Socialist Realism means not only knowing reality as it is, but knowing where it is moving. It is moving towards socialism, it is moving towards the victory of the international proletariat. And a work of art created by a Socialist Realist is one which shows where that conflict of contradictions is leading which the artist has seen in life and reflected in his work.⁹⁴

In this formula the artist was to produce a panegyric or iconic form of art which conformed strictly to the Party's narrative of socialist development.⁹⁵ Whereas the kinoki and other avant-garde artists of the 1920s had sought to expand their audience's vision of freedom and possibility, now artists were to fix that vision in ways strictly prescribed by the state. The new Soviet writer was no longer the creator of original works of art, but a chronicler of tales which were already contained in the Party's own folklore.⁹⁶ There was a sort of 'master plot' which Soviet writers were to use in shaping their own novels and characters. In its classic form, as set out in Gorky's early novel Mother (1906), the plot was a Bolshevik version of the Bildungsroman: the young worker hero joins the class struggle and through the tutelage of senior Party comrades he arrives at a higher consciousness, a better understanding of the world around him and the tasks ahead for the Revolution, before dying a martyr to the cause. Later novels added elements to this master plot: Dmitry Furmanov's Chapaev (1923) fixed the model of the civil war hero; while Fedor Gladkov's Cement (1925) and Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered raised the communist production worker to Promethean status, capable of conquering everything before him, even the most untamed forces of the natural world, as long as he allows the Party to direct his energies. But basically the story that the novelist could tell was strictly circumscribed by the